I have a site for hosting my dev projects. Each project is a node.js file. The problem is I can only have 1 project online at the same time - except if I host them in a different ports. But suppose I want to publish 2 projects like that: my_site.com/foo, my_site.com/bar, where the first is managed by "foo.js" and the second by "bar.js". How can I do that?
You need a proxy in front. You assign each separate node process a different port. The proxy forwards traffic on port 80 to the appropriate backend node process.
This can be accomplished with node-http-proxy (https://github.com/nodejitsu/node-http-proxy), or any web server. Nginx and lighttpd make it ridiculously easy, Apache less so but still completely doable.
Setup a Nginx process to reverse proxy to your Node processes. The Nginx process will hold onto the port and send requests for my_site.com/foo to the node foo.js backend process and send requests for my_site.com/bar to the node bar.js backend process.
This way your Node processes stay completely independent and can easily be separated out to different servers later if one of them becomes popular.
If you are using express/connect, you can use something along the lines of
var bar = require("./bar"),
foo = require("./foo");
app.use(express.vhost("my_site.com/bar", bar));
app.use(express.vhost("my_site.com/foo", foo));
Is A Separate File.
NOTE: Not Tested
Related
sorry if this is a wrong question on this forum but I am simply just stuck and need some advice. I have a shared hosting service and a cloud based hosting server with node.js installed. I want to host my website as normal but I also want to add real time chat and location tracking using node.js I am confused with what I am reading in several places because node.js is itself a server but not designed to host websites? So I have to run 2 different servers? One for the website and one to run node.js? When I setup the cloud one with a node.js script running I can no longer access the webpages.
Whats the best way for me achieve this as I am just going round in circles. Also is there a way I can set up a server on my PC and run and test both of these together before hand so I see what is needed and get it working as it will stop me ordering servers I dont need.
Many thanks for any help or advice.
Node can serve webpages using a framework like Express, but can cause conflicts if run on the same port as another webserver program (Apache, etc). One solution could be to serve your webpages through your webserver on port 80 (or 443 for HTTPS) and run your node server on a different port in order to send information back and forth.
There are a number of ways you can achieve this but here is one popular approach.
You can use NGINX as your front facing web server and proxy the requests to your backend Node service.
In NGINX, for example, you will configure your upstream service as follows:
upstream lucyservice {
server 127.0.0.1:8000;
keepalive 64;
}
The 8000 you see above is just an example, you may be running your Node service on a different port.
Further in your config (in the server config section) you will proxy the requests to your service as follows:
location / {
proxy_pass http://lucyservice;
}
You're Node service can be running in a process manager like forever / pm2 etc. You can have multiple Node services running in a cluster depending on how many processors your machine has etc.
So to recap - your front facing web server will be handling all traffic on port 80 (HTTP) and or 443 (HTTPS) and this will proxy the requests to your Node service running on whatever port(s) you define. All of this can happen on one single server or multiple if you need / desire.
For experimental/learning purposes (lets assume my application has lot of persistent/concurrent traffic), I have a VM running docker. For docker, I have following setup:
Everything has its own container and communicates with ports. I am trying to simulate two different servers (Nginx), load-balanced by HAProxy.
Now it works all fine and well, but as far as I think, Node is still running in just single thread.
The only configuration Nginx contains is for being reverse proxy to Node (everything else is default). Each Nginx server handles only one domain per server (Node).
Should I use Node Cluster for multi-threaded approach?
Or (assuming each server has 2 cores) should I create two node instances for each Nginx server and have it load balance? In this approach, I am unsure about how load-balancing would work. If there are two Node instances, load balanced by Nginx (or HAProxy), then it would look something like:
Now the reason I want Nginx is for static caching and stuff like DDOS protection. Does that really make sense? Or should I just have one Nginx load-balance between all four Node servers without HAProxy (the reason I am bringing in HAProxy is because some research showed it to be faster/more-reliable than Nginx (unconfirmed)).
Still new to this. Basically, I want to simulate two servers with two cores each running Node.js, reverse proxied by Nginx for static caching etc., and load-balanced by HAProxy.
Found the answer (a while ago, but just updating this post in case it helps someone).
Nginx can run multiple worker processes. So we can just use multiple virtual server blocks to implement this. The current approach I followed with Docker/Nginx/Node is:
Nginx server block 1: This listens to all requests on port 81. And this forwards all those requests to a node instance (lets call it node1).
Nginx server block 2: This listens to all requests on port 82. And forwards all of them to another node instance (lets call it node2).
In simple words, one server block communicates with node1 and another with node2, where node1 and node2 are two node instances (separate docker containers).
These are then load balanced by HAProxy. Where the server configuration is (in accordance with docker) as follows:
server n1 nginx:81
server n2 nginx:82
nginx is the container name. Nginx currently runs 2 worker processes.
(Add whatever http/tcp checks required, this is just minimal configuration).
Open to suggestions for a better approach.
I have a website under domain (say example.com) which is hosted on Amazon Web Services EC 2 instance which has Apache already installed and ready to run on port 80.Now I wish to transfer from Apache to node JS (where Node JS runs on another port, say 8001).How to change the HTTP port address of EC 2 say that when i go to that URL (example.com) it should run on node JS instead of Apache (While for temporary,node JS runs on example.com:8001).
How is it possible and Kindly help?
So you cannot direct a standard web address (e.g. www.example.com) to anything other than port 80. By default http is on port 80 and https is on port 443. You can override that default by explicitly giving the port but you cannot change that default.
So your options are:
Replace Apache with Node on port 80. This will involve shutting down Apache (and making sure it doesn't auto restart on reboot), and changing your node port to port 80. This also will probably require running your node service as root (as port 80 is usually protected) and this is not recommended (Apache starts as root to get the port but then usually immediately switches to non-root user).
Have Apache proxy forward requests to Node. This means Apache is still your main webserver and listens on port 80 but certain requests are sent on to Node.
This second option could be done using mod_proxy with config like this:
ProxyPass "/foo" "http://localhost:8001/"
ProxyPassReverse "/foo" "http://localhost:8001/"
It all depends on what you want to use your set up for and making best use of the software available to you.
Typical set up is a multi-layered approach involving one or more of these:
LoadBalancer (optional for high load sites or where resiliency is key)
Webserver
Appserver
Database
Yes you could use just Node for all of these layers. However, to me, it is more an application server than a webserver.
A webserver like Apache or Nginx is specifically designed to act like a web server, and by that I mean serving static pages and doing other top layer stuff. They have several features built up over their years to provide speed and security. Now nearly everything they can do, can be done in Node but not quite as easily and not by standard and often requires pulling in 3rd party modules.
A webserver then typically offloads dynamic work to other programs. This could be scripts (PHP or Perl), or separate app servers like Tomcat, Jboss or Node. These are typically very good at specific tasks (e.g. talking to database and generating dynamic pages) but less good at severing static pages quickly.
The beauty of node to me is for micro- services, where you can have lots of independent, but potentially interlinked, node services which are all lightweight and good at one task and the web server is still needed in front of them. This compares to a bulky multi-tasking J2EE server like Tomcat or Jboss that you would use in the past which tried to do every dynamic app under one process (though admittedly often under separate WAR files).
So, without knowing your full use case, I would suggest Apache and Node instead of Node replacing Apache.
I have a server running webmin (different domains pointing to different app/directories). Currently I can have my php app running from a directory and all I need to do in order to make it live is get webmin to direct that domain to that specific directory.
Can I do the same with a node js app? If not, how can I use node and webmin in the same box?
I know you didn't say this specifically, but assuming you're hosting the other web stuff through, say, Apache, you would need to leverage that, but you can probably get the effect you want. Basically, it sounds like you want to be able to use "host header" separation for services, rather than having a separate IP address for, say, Apache and Node.js to each use.
So, if you let Apache bind to the main port you're using (80/443/both), then you would run ode and have it configured to listen on a different port (say 8080 as in the example you left in another comment). You can then use mod_proxy in Apache and have it route request with certain domain names to Node. Here's a: more concrete example of this but really the idea is not specific to Node. It can apply to any other process that wants to respond to HTTP requests on your server (or even on a different server).
Please pardon my ignorance on node.js. I have started reading on node.js and have some perception which might be wrong. So needed it to clarify
When we use createServer() method, does it creates a virtual server. Not sure whether the term "virtual" is appropriate, but it's the best I can describe it :)
I am confused that how should I deploy my application having node.js + other custom js files as a part of it. If I deploy my application in the main server, does that mean I have two servers?
Thanks for bearing with me.
I will try to answer that:
Q1:
createServer basically creates a process which listens on the specified port for the requests. So yes you can call it as a virtual server which constantly listens for request at the port.
Q2:
Yes you can say that it has now 2 servers
For eg: you server had apache initially which listens to port 80 (you can access it as http://example.com/ it by default looks for port 80)
and then you also start the node service listening on some other port for eg: port 8456 (you can access it as http://example.com:8456/ which will look for port 8456)
So yes you can there are two servers.
EDIT
Q: So what would be the difference if the page is served by the physical server and the virtual server created by node.js?
Physical Server and Node Server are 2 different things and there is no way a single request is going to both the servers.
For eg:
I use apache server to host my website running on PHP. It serves all the html contents of my website (which involves connecting to mysql for data).
Some of the requests could be:
http://example.com/reports.php
http://example.com/search.php
At the other end I might be using nodejs server for totally another purpose. For eg: I might use it for an API, which returns JSON/XML in return. I can use this API myself for some dynamic contents by making AJAX calls with javascript or simple CURL commands from PHP. Or I might also make this API available to public.
Some of the requests could be:
http://example.com:8456/getList?apikey=¶m1=¶m2=
My choice for NodeJs Server used as an API would be for its ability to handle concurrent request and since its asynchronous for file operations it will be much faster than PHP.
In this case I have a website which is not only working on PHP but its the combination of 2 different technologies (PHP on Apache and Nodejs) and hence 2 servers are totally different running on same server but have there own execution space.
Third Question:
So what would be the difference if the page is served by the physical server and the virtual server created by node.js?
If I might add, it's a virtual server in the sense that apache is an virtual http server listening on whatever port. Of course apache had a lot more modules and plugins and configurations to it where as Node's is lighter (kind of like WEBrick for rails), non-blocking and agile for building on. Then again apache is more stable.. in other words, it's a decision of software, both sitting on the server listening to a particular port set by you.
That said there's deployment methods that allow you to place a node application in front of software such as nginx (another server-side software) or HAproxy (load handling with a lot of power), so really it's all up to how you choose to configure it.
Maybe I'm getting to far from your question, but I hope this helps!
Also, You should give the answer to the other guy, he came first ;)